Tag: 1919 Page 1 of 3

Coffee Houses as Saloon Substitutes in Toronto

On December 25, 2025

This picture has nothing to do with the article, but it was on the same newspaper page and I thought it looked good.

Surveys Now Being Made of City to Determine Best Types of Social Meeting – Places to Take Place of Old “Poor Men’s Clubs” – To Use Old Barrooms?

Br Gregory Clark, December 27, 1919.

Toronto has had a happy old year, in which has come peace, and the marching back of tens of thousands of her sons, the overturning of the rickety political wagon and the final and irrevocable ousting of booze.

A fairly happy and industrious old year!

In the Happy New Year, which, out of old custom, is being predicted with Dickensian fervor these few days by one and all, such matters as prices, wages, the building of a new political bus, the embalming and final burial of the remains of Old Bill Booze, stand out as demanding some of the happy industry such as dispensed in 1919.

But one of the most interesting undertakings of the coming year is the discovery of a substitute for the bar, something to take the place of the saloon in the social arrangement, the provision of the “poor man’s club.”

And it speaks well for the powers that be that already the united churches of Canada, the Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, and other agencies vitally interested in the needs of man are all seriously bent to the task of finding a substitute for the bar.

When even the liquor interests reluctantly admitted that the bar-room was doomed as a social institution, everyone recognized that something had been taken away from a certain great class of our citizenship. There was some justice in the claim that the saloon was the “poor man’s club.” With its passing, the man who could not afford to belong to institutions for human intercourse such as clubs and societies, had to fall back on the pool rooms, bowling alleys, barber shops, and public meetings.

Home life has been stimulated. The married man who used to frequent his “club” down at the corner and commune with his fellows over a scuttle of beer, has found new pleasures in the company of his family.

Hundreds Hunt Companionship

But all men are not married. Hence the success of hundreds of piffling public meetings in the past year. Hence the hordes of young men aimlessly wandering about down town after business hours, seeking entertainment and accepting whatever chanceth.

Since the passing of the bar, movies, poolrooms, bowling alleys have met the social needs of men. The well-to-do still have their tea rooms, cosy and congenial, where they can sit and relax. But tea rooms are no places for the working man, with their atmosphere of gush and giggle, oolong and macaroons.

Can Toronto successfully operate coffee houses to take the place of the bar rooms?

Quiet, leisurely places where coffee, tea, sandwiches, etc., are sold at a modest price, where plain men can sit of an evening as long as they like, as our fathers did of old in the coffee houses of Britain, and as our American brethren are attempting to do across the border now.

The Interchurch Forward Movement is studying that question.

Rev. Peter Bryce is now making a social survey of Toronto, one object of which is the investigation of the social needs of every district of the city, and the discovery of what form the social and recreational centres should take.

The Y.M.C.A., which is now operating the Red Triangle Club¹ at Queen and Victoria streets for returned soldiers, proposes to maintain the premises as a down-town social organization when, in due course, the military work comes to an end.

The Salvation Army has been operating its Soldiers’ Hostel in the old Krausman Hotel² at King and Church streets for four years. Its military nature has been undergoing a gradual change, weaving itself back into the civic fabric. And Commissioner Richards of the Salvation Army is studying its development closely, with the idea of discovering the most complete form of social agency for the present day.

The time may not be far distant when many of the old saloons of Toronto may flourish again, not as fountains of evil, where homes were poisoned and lives withered, but as coffee houses where men can gather for the simple and ancient pleasure of being together.

Roosevelt Coffee Houses

In the United States this problem is receiving different treatments from different organizations.

The latest development is that undertaken by the three sons of Theodore Roosevelt. They are leading a movement for the re-establishment of the coffee house as it was before the advent of the saloon. For, three hundred years ago, saloons were unknown in Britain or the United States. There were taverns. But men gathered in coffee houses for relaxation and recreation, not in the gin mills. Coffee houses date back to the thirteenth century. Saloons were a modern development, the product of the Georgian era, the drunken era.

The first in the Roosevelt boys’ chain of coffee houses is on West Forty-fourth street, New York. It is a quiet, humble shop, formerly a barroom. It is filled with tables. Coffee, tea, milk, cheese sandwiches are sold. It is a sort of leisurely soda parlor. But there is none of the hustle and rush of a restaurant about it. It is designed for fellowship.

And it is not run for profit, but to be self-supporting only.

The survey of Toronto now being made by Rev. Peter Bryce is not a complete accounting of the entire area of the city, but covers a number of typical and representative districts.

The intimacy of the study of these districts, which is being made by professional sociologists can be judged by these headings, which direct the workers to the information required:

Total population of district, nationalities and numbers of each, principal occupation, special industrial groups in area, what changes in area in ten years; what educational institutions, what attendance; what churches in area, attendance, with charts and maps; what missions, Sunday schools, settlements, with attendance; what playgrounds, movies, theatres, poolrooms, bowling alleys; what places of evil influence. And the student of each district is to enquire into what policy or change of policy is required.

As to the Salvation Army, Commissioner Richards says:

“The Army that has taken over the lepers of Java, the Inebriates Island of New Zealand; which patrols the shores of Norway and Denmark for wrecked sailors, and has raised the Lord’s banner in every part of the world, will not fail to give Toronto just what it needs for the social welfare of its people.”

Editor’s Notes: The Toronto Star was editorially in favour of Prohibition, so Greg had to write the way he did about the evils of alcohol, though I don’t think he believed it personally.

I mentioned this before, it was the club run by the YMCA for returning soldiers. ↩︎
The Krausman Hotel was taken down in 1970. ↩︎

Visiting the Canadian Art Academy Exhibition With Snivers the Plumber

by admin

On December 11, 2025

In Miscellaneous, Other Story

***Their hands made peculiar gestures, and they held out their thumbs after the manner of Romance emperors to the gladiators – thumbs up meaning “spare it” – thumbs down, “kill it.”***

By Gregory Clark, December 13, 1919.

Toronto is the artistic centre of Canada.

Also musical and dramatic. We have for proof of this the statements of concert and theatrical managers in their advertising. Of course, cynical people say that these managers make the same statements in Whitby, Hamilton, and Shakespeare, Ont. But we Torontonians recognize the ring of truth in such statements in regard to the Queen City.

We haven’t a Symphony Orchestra like Huntsville, Ont., nor a Dramatic Society like Galt. But we at least have the exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The investigation of the artistic spirit of Toronto is a puzzling undertaking for the ordinary citizen.

Here, for instance, is this exhibition in the Grange¹. Here, surely, we will find the artistic spirit almost tangibly materialized. We will find artistic people, Toronto’s literati, artists, perhaps.

We asked a sharp and successful young bond dealer, who knew everything and everybody, where the Grange was.

“Why,” says he, “that’s Home Smith’s old residence up in behind the north-west corner of McCaul and Queen streets!”

Shades of Goldwin and ancient secessionists, how are the mighty fallen²!

However, we found the Grange, in its wide old-fashioned park set in the crowded midst of the boarding-house and foreign section. It is no longer the Grange. It is the Toronto Art Museum. A fine grey-bricked box has been built on the back of Goldwin Smith’s old residence. And in this box, are three rooms containing a hundred and seventy-two pictures by Canadian artists.

There are two knockers and three different kinds of bell handles on Goldwin Smith’s front door – a kind of an historical exhibit in themselves, possibly. We knocked and pulled all five, and a young lady opened quickly to admit us. Apparently, Goldwin Smith’s front door is the back door of the Toronto Art Museum. Anyway, we had to hasten through the privacy of the late Mr. Smith’s study (family portraits and all) to reach the box at the back.

Here we found a hundred and seventy-two pictures, twenty sculptures, six architects’ plans, thirty-six etchings, and seventy-three citizens.

And the rooms were sizzling with the artistic spirit!

Silence brooded over the place, except for the deep-breathing of a middle-aged lady of very artistic appearance, who sat back on a bench and stared intently at a picture entitled “The Beaver Dam.”

Here and there were men and women, young and old, who seemed hypnotized by some one picture. They walked slowly towards the picture of their desire, eyes half-closed. Then they would back slowly away from it. Then to one side and to the other. Their hands made peculiar gestures, and they held out their thumbs, after the manner of Roman emperors to the gladiators – thumbs up meaning “spare it,” thumbs, down, “kill it.” After going through this ritual, they heaved an expressive sigh, and moved on to another picture.

There was a plenty of long hair, steel-rimmed spectacles, English rain coats and other marks of the artistic temperament. There were untidy old ladles and elaborately dowdy young ladies in tweed suits and flat-heeled boots. Long-haired young men, with dreamy eyes and the detached, eccentric manners of poets and artists. And here and there an old man, with a feverish air, who wandered from wall to wall murmuring “Good, good!” or “bad, bad!”

In fact we saw only five perfectly ordinary people in the whole place. They looked like bank managers or brokers. They were strikingly out of place. They seemed lost. We wondered who they were and what they were doing here.

Suddenly we came upon Smivvers³, our old family plumber, sitting dejectedly on a bench.

“Hello!” we cried. “What are you doing here? Trying to spend some of your war winnings on pictures?

“No,” groaned Smivvers. “I’m with my wife!”

And be pointed to the middle-aged artistic-looking lady who was still sitting and breathing passionately as she looked at the picture of “The Beaver Dam.”

“Your wife has the artistic temperament?” we asked.

“Only recently,” groaned Smivvers.

So we sat down beside Smivvers for a rest.

“How do you like the exhibition?” we asked.

“Well,” said Smivvers, a tone of exasperation in his voice, “I’ve been around the rooms three times, and there are only twenty-seven pictures out of the whole lot that would make a decent Christmas card or calendar. The rest wouldn’t stand a chance with a good publisher.

“I’ll tell you what! Patriotism has ruined art in Canada. Apparently most of these artists have come home from the war with their hands, all calloused from digging trenches and have started right in to paint, pictures Well, you can see the results! Just look at some of them! Whoever saw a sky that color, or a tree that shape, or a purple and pink forest! My son is doing better work than that and he’s only in the senior second book. Patriotism is all right, but it shouldn’t be used to make fun of these artists before they’ve got their hands in. A lot of my plumbers that were at the war had to have a lot of training when they came back. You bet, I didn’t send them out to put in comic taps and amusing furnaces just for patriotism. The public wouldn’t stand it. I think the manager of this exhibition ought to have a heart!”

“You don’t think it’s the new art?” we asked.

“New art!” exclaimed Mr. Smivvers. “New gas pipes! The lads that did those unfinished pictures there are recovering from wounds or shell shock! The Government ought to take a hand in re-establishing our artists. Otherwise our calendars, gift cards and parlor pictures are going to the dogs!”

“Let’s mingle with some of these artists” we whispered, “and get some information on the subject.”

So the three of us began to break in on the meditations of the long-haired and untidy ones, We picked the most artistic-looking ones first. We discovered the first three to be respectively a grocer, a bank clerk and a hotel manager. The next dozen or so included salesmen, butchers, journalists, boot and shoe dealers, bill collectors, dentists and retired gentlemen.

Divil⁴ an artist did we find! Out in the corridor we held a council.

“What do you know about that!” gasped Smivvers.

So we decided that we would start from the other end, avoiding the artistic-looking people and picking on the least likely looking ones in our efforts to find an artist.

Right then we spied those five ordinary looking men whose close hair cuts, blue serge suits and polished shoes proclaimed them bankers or brokers. They were standing dejectedly in a group out in the corridor below us.

“There,” whispered Smivvers, “Let’s start with them!”

Yes, they were artists!”

In fact, they were the only artists in the building. They were just on they way out to go and play a game of golf.

They didn’t want to talk about art. They laughed, at us and shyly referred our questions to some of the experts inside. And before we could ask about the unfinished pictures, and whether they were painted in the dark as a sort of stunt, or by soldiers blinded in the war, they hustled into their coats, and fled.

So Smivvers took us around the three rooms and showed us the twenty-seven pictures he had selected as suitable for calendars or Christmas cards.

Editor’s Notes:

The Grange is a historic Georgian manor and was the first home of the Art Museum of Toronto. Today, it is part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. ↩︎
Goldwin Smith was the last resident of the Grange, and died in 1910, only 9 years before this article. He is called “Home Smith” because of his opposition to Irish Home rule. He was also against Prohibition, female suffrage and state socialism. He was also an antisemite. ↩︎
The headline says Snivers, but the rest of the article says Smivvers. ↩︎
Divil is slang for devil. It says that in the original article, perhaps a typo? Or meaning that they could not find any artists? Maybe using “devil” was discouraged at the time? So many questions…. ↩︎

At the Red Triangle Club

by admin

On May 6, 2025

In Comic, Life's Little Comedies

In Toronto in 1917, the Y.M.C.A. opened a recreational club specifically for First World War soldiers: The Red Triangle Club.

Real Stories of the War

by admin

On April 10, 2025

In Illustration, Miscellaneous

The Star Weekly ran a series in 1919 called “Real Stories of the War, As Told by Returned Soldiers” where prizes were awarded. Jim illustrated some of these. The first one here was about the capture of a Prussian Brass Band, which won $1.

This story was about capturing Germans while gathering food, which also won $1. ($1 in 1919 would be $17 in 2025).

Back to “Civies”

by admin

On February 4, 2025

In Comic, Life's Little Comedies

Deer Hunting! Never Again!!

by admin

On November 14, 2024

In Miscellaneous, Other Story

By Gregory Clark , November 15, 1919.

Of the false joys of deer hunting, several hundred Toronto men are by this time wholly aware.

As far as one can make out, deer hunters are like drink addicts or dope fiends. After each hunting trip, they swear off. Never again for them. Nevermore will they desert the comforts of a large city for two November weeks spent amid slush, sleet, and vast uncultivated areas of fallen timber and prickly underbrush.

But when the first hint of sleet is in the air, the confirmed deer hunter seizes his rifle, some old clothes and a dunnage bag, and jumps the first train north.

To-day and for the next few days, however, they are returning with the “never again” expression on their faces, tired, starved, weak and unshaven. However, they try to disguise their real feelings, they are as fed-up as troops coming out of the line after a twenty-one day tour.

Jimmy and I know, for we have just returned from our first hunting trip.

Back in September, egged on by the boasting of certain confirmed deer hunters around the office, we started to make plans. We invited half a dozen others to join our party, and all these gave a delighted acceptance. But on the eve of November fifth, the opening of the deer season, to our astonishment, they all advised us in regretful accents, of their inability to come with us. It isn’t our astonishment now.

Alone and full of high hopes, Jimmy and I set off for our summer cottage for the hunt.

Passing over as immaterial our arrival at a Georgian Bay town, our wrestling with dunnage bags, rifles, and those odd articles of baggage that always seem to get themselves carried at the last moment, our early rising in a frost-bitten hotel and our journey by gasoline launch (at twelve dollars¹), over the Arctic expanses of the lower Georgian Bay, we arrived about noon, at our summer cottage. Gone were all the balmy green trees, the warm rocks, the soft blue waters. Our summer cottage was a draughty, bleak little building standing forth naked amid a few bare trees, with frost on its roof. There was ice along the beach where, four short months ago, I was wont to paddle my feet.

After a short inspection of the inside of the cottage, inhospitably packed up for the winter, we decided to shift a couple of camp stretchers into the kitchen and there to cook, eat, live and sleep.

We carried a half-ton rowboat out of the dining room to the water and rowed down to the farm of a French family, about a mile away, to arrange about going after deer. After due consideration, the French family agreed to quit work on the stone foundations of a new house and come hunting with us.

Jimmy and I had vague notions that in hunting deer, we walked through a pleasant autumn forest, with hounds stepping gracefully in front of us, ever and anon scaring up startled deer, which ran in terror from us like young cows, while we stood back and fired carefully aimed shots after them, killing them in their tracks.

What deer hunting really is comes as follows:

Three hours before dawn, the kitchen fire having been out some hours, the frigid breezes blowing through the cracks of the cottage wake us from our fitful slumber. We rise in very grumpy spirits, put on a fire, sit disconsolately around while we prepare a breakfast of canned beans, brittle bacon and tea. Then we array ourselves for action, go down to the rowboat and crack the ice in the bottom of it and row, on chilly seats, down to our guides just as dawn pales the east.

At our guides’ they remove our dashing khaki hunting coats and give us old blue coats several sizes too large.

“No good being mistook for a fawn,” we are told.

Then we commence to walk. Up hill down dale, over rocks, through swamps and impenetrable forests we go. And although it is a bitter November day, with sleet biting us, we perspire richly.

After tramping for an hour and a half, till our fine new hunting boots are scraping the flesh off our heels, we are halted on a high, open stretch of rock, where the wind howls in freedom, and the fine sleet spins and eddies past us. We are told to stand very still and watch up this stretch of rock. Jimmy is placed across a gully on a similar ridge

The hound has meanwhile been taken in a long detour away off in the distance.

We stand in a position of readiness, our rifle at the alert. The perspiration soon freezes to our skin. Our fingers grasping the metal of the rifle grows numb and senseless. Our feet feel like blocks of ice. But we Keep a stern eye up the ridge.

Quarter hours pass that seem like hours. An hour passes that seems like a day. We commence to shiver quite violently, and stamp our feet on the rocks, while our attention wavers.

Suddenly, far in the distance, we hear the baying of a hound.

Our shivering turns to a regular shaking. It is uncontrollable. Our hands seem like feet. We make a pitiful attempt to come into a position of readiness. The hounds’ barking grows, nearer and nearer.

Then, with no sound and with no movement of the bushes a greyish brown form trimmed with white appears ahead of us.

It moves like a wind-blown leaf. It does not seem to touch the ground. Nothing on earth moves so swiftly or so gracefully or so silently.

Like a streak of lightning it passes us within twenty-five feet, a great white tail waving bravely.

The howling dog appearing at the far end of the ridge wakes us from our trance. A fine big buck has passed!

We are still shivering violently and in a mental daze when our guide dashes up out of the underbrush and yells–

“Why didn’t you shoot! Why didn’t you shoot!”

“Shoot what?” you ask weakly.

“That deer! It went within a few feet of you!”

“Shoot that!” you cry indignantly. “Say, what do you think. I am? An aviator?”

Well, after four or five repetitions of this tramping through wildernesses designed for mountain goats and cringing on bleak Alaskan plateaux till our bodies feel about to fall to pieces and a warm fireside seems the furthest thing in the universe; and after four or five deer have gone past us or over us before our feeble minds could grasp their presence, we finally control our mechanism sufficiently to pull the trigger viciously just at that furious moment the great, soaring buck sails past. And by some miracle, he leaps fair in front of your bullet and crumples pitifully and tragically into a slim little brown heap on the ground.

A live deer is a big, splendid, graceful, beautiful creature. A dead deer is as pitiful a little thing as a dead rabbit.

But when you tie his four knees together and lift him up on a pole to carry him two miles to the nearest water, he is neither little nor pitiful. He weighs over two hundred pounds. He sways and swings on the pole as you walk. The first fifty yards is the dickens. The second fifty yards is an inferno. After that you lose consciousness of all human feelings and just struggle along. Where the rocks and bush were rough before, they are mountainous when carrying out your deer. Where there were open spaces to pick your way before, these all magically close up into jumbled ravines and frozen wet swamps, as if in protest against the killing of a king of the forest.

Scarce remembering our names or standing, we at last reach the river and a motorboat. In it we sit and freeze on the journey back to the summer cottage. How warmly we pictured this return with the venison! How cold the actual performance left us!

Ah, well, it may have cost us something in pride to find what deer shooting was. But we didn’t do as badly as the three American hunters, who came up to these parts to shoot moose. No silly little deer for them! Moose or nothing. And hardly had they entered the bush when they saw three large dark brown animals on the shore of a lake. With deadly aim, all three hunters fired, and killed our French settler’s three horses. To avoid aspersions on their reputations as hunters rather than to account for the damage to the Frenchman’s property, these three New Yorkers paid five hundred dollars each².

As for Jimmie and I, we will go deer hunting never again.

But when we do, we are going to take valets along to carry fur lined garments for us; and a larger party, to help bring in the meat.

Editor’s Notes:

$12 in 1919 would be $195 in 2024. ↩︎
$500 in 1919 would be $8090 in 2024. ↩︎

“September Morn”

by admin

On September 17, 2024

In Comic, Life's Little Comedies

September Morn is a painting by Paul Chabas from 1912. It caused a sensation at the time because of the nudity, and was parodied for years afterwards, including by Jim above.